Last week’s SACP-Cosatu–inspired rolling mass action has been an interesting thing to observe, to say the least.The idea had been to bring the central business district of Johannesburg, if not the country itself, to its knees.
‘No more job losses,†the placards read. ‘No more racism in the workplace.†‘Deflate the currency strong Rand means less jobs.â€
One found oneself locked into an Orwellian enigma. George Orwell, that is, the English intellectual who wrote himself into an early grave trying to unravel the contradictions of class, race, sexual empowerment and life in general. Orwell’s Animal Farm had come to life, unwittingly, in the dead streets of the Jo’burg CBD.
I have to admit that Cosatu’s Zwelinzima Vavi has a wonderful singing voice. It rang out beautifully through the loudspeaker as he led thousands of red-bandannered, red-T-shirted, black-trousered, baffle-eyed stalwarts away from the steps of City Hall, all the way past the derelict Rissik Street Post Office and toward the slopes of Braamfontein, where their buses were waiting to bus them back from whence they had come.
Vavi and his fellow leaders of the people’s movement were riding trium-phantly, like Caesar, punching their soft, victorious fists in the air, facing backward on the backs of slow-moving, carefully orchestrated lorries spewing diesel fumes at the heads of the obedient crowd.
The crowd, in their tens of thousands (read: the Roman plebeians, footsore after a day of raucous mass action and howling an orchestrated howl for the defeated Pompey — read Jacob Zuma) just wanted to get back on those uncomfortable buses and get home.
And so the day of rolling mass action spluttered out the last of its energy as the sun set over the western sky of a downtown Johannesburg, criss-crossed in its dying rays by fading skyscrapers and endlessly moving highways to somewhere else.
The last week has been a sad, threadbare reflection of our political times — particularly coming, as it does, in the week of what should have been a celebration and a reaffirmation of the values contained in the marking of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Freedom Charter.
Rolling mass action, way back in 1955, had a value and a sense of purpose. There was us and there were the Boers. The rolling mass action of the present, such as it is, makes you wonder where all those high ideals went to — and, indeed, who are the nouveau Boers.
And so we find ourselves, unwillingly and unwittingly, back in the troughs of George Orwell’s animal farm. The smarter animals (the pigs, as Orwell had them) have taken up residence in Sandton, Rivonia and the more salubrious areas of the north, in Cape Town and all those pretty expanses in between.
The rest of us are locked in that twilight zone, where anything could happen — like Vosloorus and Philippi and Khayelitsha, and any other township you care to mention. The farm, its mud and its randomly violent mentality has remained the same.
I found myself unexpectedly irritated by the national call to strike of the past week. Just like I find myself irritated, to put it mildly, by the behaviour of the so-called taxi drivers who control our streets, and the government-empowered traffic officers in their funky outfits who bust me for speeding or parking in unempowered parking areas but let those same arrogant taxi drivers literally get away with murder. I feel like a cranky white person of the old dispensation when an outsized Toyota minibus, filled to the brim with helpless black commuters, pushes me into oncoming traffic because he is drifting across the white line as he hoots for more customers on the left — while I am minding my own business in the right-hand lane — his arm hanging out of the driver’s window like a Free State farmer counting cattle with the whole horizon at his fat, arrogant fingertips. I, who pay tax for simply driving my car on the road, should also have the right to toyi-toyi against this. But, for some crazy reason, I don’t.
Our urban roads are crazy. We accept it. Our politicians are insular, narrow, play their cards close to their chests, don’t tell us what’s going on and, generally, act crazy. We accept it. We go on because we don’t know what’s going on.
Trevor ‘Blue Eyes†Manuel stands in the middle of the highway and tells us to pay our taxes sharply on the 8th of July because it’s good for the country — and we do it. Because it’s crazy. But that’s what we do.
And so, while we feel more than a glancing sympathy for the masses of the unemployed in this country, we also feel a sense of anger and bafflement against those who dare to speak for them and encourage them to indulge in this thing called rolling mass action in this day and age.
What has been achieved? Downtown Johannesburg, where nothing much happens anymore anyway, was hardly brought to its knees on June 27. The textile industry has been able to confirm, through the voluntary mass absence of its workforce, that it does not need local workers anyway (the useful ones are all in China, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore) and the mines have been downgrading for years.
So, who scored out of it all? Well, I guess the taxi drivers who had a field day picking up stragglers who missed the bus. And one Jacob Zuma who, even though he wasn’t there, had a captive audience for free. For some reason that escapes me.